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censorship

  • SOURCE: PEN America
    6/13/2023

    PEN Condemns Censorship in Removal of Coates's Memoir from AP Course

    Several students reported their teacher using terms that mirrored the language of the state law—claiming the lesson "made them ashamed to be Caucasian"—resulting in the school board's decision to remove the book from an Advanced Placement Language course. 

  • SOURCE: The Hill
    5/22/2023

    CA's Newsom Demands Info on Florida Textbook Revisions

    “You don’t get to rewrite history in a back room. You don’t get to erase basic facts around segregation, the holocaust, or Rosa Parks’ story. The extremists in Florida and textbook companies that are colluding with them are about to be exposed.”

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    5/18/2023

    The Fight for the Soul of a Missouri School Board

    by Sue Halpern

    Even in a conservative community in southwestern Missouri, a grassroots group of parents and students has rallied to oppose right-wing efforts to restrict books available in the local public schools. 

  • SOURCE: PEN America
    5/1/2023

    Academic Freedom Battleground Shifts from Classroom to Institutions

    by Jeffrey Sachs, Jeremy C. Young and Jonathan Friedman

    Conservative leaders like Adam Kissel are advising lawmakers to defeat First Amendment protections for what professors say in the classroom by shifting legislation's focus to defining concepts as outside the bounds of academic disciplines and academic fields as outside the bounds of the university's mission. 

  • SOURCE: Business Insider
    4/16/2023

    Will Louisiana Ban Study of Racism Outright?

    Republican state officials in a party resolution appear to hold the position that "inglorious aspects" of American history are too divisive to be discussed in state institutions of highe education. 

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    4/5/2023

    Fighting Book Bans—and Winning

    by Alyssa Rosenberg

    Although book-banners have the attention of the media and are being used by politicians to create wedge issues, it's important to remember that the policy is unpopular, and can be resisted. 

  • 3/19/2023

    Censoring History Education Goes Hand in Hand with Democratic Backsliding

    by Julia Boechat Machado and Ruben Zeeman

    Regimes in the Philippines, India and Brazil have recently tried to censor the teaching of history in service of their poltical goals and claims to power. The pushback by scholars in these countries should inspire historians in Florida and elsewhere to resist the political censorship of research and teaching. 

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    3/16/2023

    Meet Some Librarians Fighting Back

    Librarian Mary Grahame Hunter says libraries are places where children's rights and intellectual autonomy are respected. Some in her Michigan community are working to change that. 

  • SOURCE: The Hill
    3/3/2023

    At its 150th Anniversary, the Comstock Law is Relevant Again

    by Jonathan Friedman and Amy Werbel

    Anthony Comstock drew on elite connections to give himself near unilateral power to confiscate "obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, or immoral" materials —terms he was free to define on his own—and prosecute people for possessing them. Right-wing politicians seem to be inspired by the example.